One of the most prominent and widely-used blockchain privacy solutions are zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) mixers operating on top of smart contract-enabled blockchains. ZKP mixers typically advertise their level of privacy through a so-called anonymity set size, similar to k-anonymity, where a user hides among a set of $k$ other users. In reality, however, these anonymity set claims are mostly inaccurate, as we find through empirical measurements of the currently most active ZKP mixers. We propose five heuristics that, in combination, can increase the probability that an adversary links a withdrawer to the correct depositor on average by 51.94% (108.63%) on the most popular Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) mixer, respectively. Our empirical evidence is hence also the first to suggest a differing privacy-predilection of users on ETH and BSC. We further identify 105 Decentralized Finance (DeFi) attackers leveraging ZKP mixers as the initial funds and to deposit attack revenue (e.g., from phishing scams, hacking centralized exchanges, and blockchain project attacks). State-of-the-art mixers are moreover tightly intertwined with the growing DeFi ecosystem by offering ``anonymity mining'' (AM) incentives, i.e., mixer users receive monetary rewards for mixing coins. However, contrary to the claims of related work, we find that AM does not always contribute to improving the quality of an anonymity set size of a mixer, because AM tends to attract privacy-ignorant users naively reusing addresses.
We consider the question of adaptive data analysis within the framework of convex optimization. We ask how many samples are needed in order to compute $\epsilon$-accurate estimates of $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ gradients queried by gradient descent, and we provide two intermediate answers to this question. First, we show that for a general analyst (not necessarily gradient descent) $\Omega(1/\epsilon^3)$ samples are required. This rules out the possibility of a foolproof mechanism. Our construction builds upon a new lower bound (that may be of interest of its own right) for an analyst that may ask several non adaptive questions in a batch of fixed and known $T$ rounds of adaptivity and requires a fraction of true discoveries. We show that for such an analyst $\Omega (\sqrt{T}/\epsilon^2)$ samples are necessary. Second, we show that, under certain assumptions on the oracle, in an interaction with gradient descent $\tilde \Omega(1/\epsilon^{2.5})$ samples are necessary. Our assumptions are that the oracle has only \emph{first order access} and is \emph{post-hoc generalizing}. First order access means that it can only compute the gradients of the sampled function at points queried by the algorithm. Our assumption of \emph{post-hoc generalization} follows from existing lower bounds for statistical queries. More generally then, we provide a generic reduction from the standard setting of statistical queries to the problem of estimating gradients queried by gradient descent. These results are in contrast with classical bounds that show that with $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ samples one can optimize the population risk to accuracy of $O(\epsilon)$ but, as it turns out, with spurious gradients.
The emerging public awareness and government regulations of data privacy motivate new paradigms of collecting and analyzing data that are transparent and acceptable to data owners. We present a new concept of privacy and corresponding data formats, mechanisms, and theories for privatizing data during data collection. The privacy, named Interval Privacy, enforces the raw data conditional distribution on the privatized data to be the same as its unconditional distribution over a nontrivial support set. Correspondingly, the proposed privacy mechanism will record each data value as a random interval (or, more generally, a range) containing it. The proposed interval privacy mechanisms can be easily deployed through survey-based data collection interfaces, e.g., by asking a respondent whether its data value is within a randomly generated range. Another unique feature of interval mechanisms is that they obfuscate the truth but do not perturb it. Using narrowed range to convey information is complementary to the popular paradigm of perturbing data. Also, the interval mechanisms can generate progressively refined information at the discretion of individuals, naturally leading to privacy-adaptive data collection. We develop different aspects of theory such as composition, robustness, distribution estimation, and regression learning from interval-valued data. Interval privacy provides a new perspective of human-centric data privacy where individuals have a perceptible, transparent, and simple way of sharing sensitive data.
Cryptocurrency has been extensively studied as a decentralized financial technology built on blockchain. However, there is a lack of understanding of user experience with cryptocurrency exchanges, the main means for novice users to interact with cryptocurrency. We conduct a qualitative study to provide a panoramic view of user experience and security perception of exchanges. All 15 Chinese participants mainly use centralized exchanges (CEX) instead of decentralized exchanges (DEX) to trade decentralized cryptocurrency, which is paradoxical. A closer examination reveals that CEXes provide better usability and charge lower transaction fee than DEXes. Country-specific security perceptions are observed. Though DEXes provide better anonymity and privacy protection, and are free of governmental regulation, these are not necessary features for many participants. Based on the findings, we propose design implications to make cryptocurrency trading more decentralized.
As machine learning algorithms become increasingly integrated in crucial decision-making scenarios, such as healthcare, recruitment, and risk assessment, there have been increasing concerns about the privacy and fairness of such systems. Federated learning has been viewed as a promising solution for collaboratively training of machine learning models among multiple parties while maintaining the privacy of their local data. However, federated learning also poses new challenges in mitigating the potential bias against certain populations (e.g., demographic groups), as this typically requires centralized access to the sensitive information (e.g., race, gender) of each data point. Motivated by the importance and challenges of group fairness in federated learning, in this work, we propose FairFed, a novel algorithm to enhance group fairness via a fairness-aware aggregation method, which aims to provide fair model performance across different sensitive groups (e.g., racial, gender groups) while maintaining high utility. This formulation can further provide more flexibility in the customized local debiasing strategies for each client. We build our FairFed algorithm around the secure aggregation protocol of federated learning. When running federated training on widely investigated fairness datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art fair federated learning frameworks under a high heterogeneous sensitive attribute distribution. We also investigate the performance of FairFed on naturally distributed real-life data collected from different geographical locations or departments within an organization.
Privacy protection is an essential issue in personalized news recommendation, and federated learning can potentially mitigate the privacy concern by training personalized news recommendation models over decentralized user data.For a theoretical privacy guarantee, differential privacy is necessary. However, applying differential privacy to federated recommendation training and serving conventionally suffers from the unsatisfactory trade-off between privacy and utility due to the high-dimensional characteristics of model gradients and hidden representations. In addition, there is no formal privacy guarantee for both training and serving in federated recommendation. In this paper, we propose a unified federated news recommendation method for effective and privacy-preserving model training and online serving with differential privacy guarantees. We first clarify the notion of differential privacy over users' behavior data for both model training and online serving in the federated recommendation scenario. Next, we propose a privacy-preserving online serving mechanism under this definition with differentially private user interest decomposition. More specifically, it decomposes the high-dimensional and privacy-sensitive user embedding into a combination of public basic vectors and adds noise to the combination coefficients. In this way, it can avoid the dimension curse and improve the utility by reducing the required noise intensity for differential privacy. Besides, we design a federated recommendation model training method with differential privacy, which can avoid the dimension-dependent noise for large models via label permutation and differentially private attention modules. Experiments on real-world news recommendation datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in achieving a good trade-off between privacy protection and utility for federated news recommendations.
The concept of federated learning (FL) was first proposed by Google in 2016. Thereafter, FL has been widely studied for the feasibility of application in various fields due to its potential to make full use of data without compromising the privacy. However, limited by the capacity of wireless data transmission, the employment of federated learning on mobile devices has been making slow progress in practical. The development and commercialization of the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks has shed some light on this. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of existing federated learning schemes for mobile devices and propose a novel cross-device federated learning framework, which utilizes the anonymous communication technology and ring signature to protect the privacy of participants while reducing the computation overhead of mobile devices participating in FL. In addition, our scheme implements a contribution-based incentive mechanism to encourage mobile users to participate in FL. We also give a case study of autonomous driving. Finally, we present the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and discuss some open issues in federated learning.
Federated learning with differential privacy, or private federated learning, provides a strategy to train machine learning models while respecting users' privacy. However, differential privacy can disproportionately degrade the performance of the models on under-represented groups, as these parts of the distribution are difficult to learn in the presence of noise. Existing approaches for enforcing fairness in machine learning models have considered the centralized setting, in which the algorithm has access to the users' data. This paper introduces an algorithm to enforce group fairness in private federated learning, where users' data does not leave their devices. First, the paper extends the modified method of differential multipliers to empirical risk minimization with fairness constraints, thus providing an algorithm to enforce fairness in the central setting. Then, this algorithm is extended to the private federated learning setting. The proposed algorithm, \texttt{FPFL}, is tested on a federated version of the Adult dataset and an "unfair" version of the FEMNIST dataset. The experiments on these datasets show how private federated learning accentuates unfairness in the trained models, and how FPFL is able to mitigate such unfairness.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Machine learning plays a role in many deployed decision systems, often in ways that are difficult or impossible to understand by human stakeholders. Explaining, in a human-understandable way, the relationship between the input and output of machine learning models is essential to the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems. A burgeoning body of research seeks to define the goals and methods of explainability in machine learning. In this paper, we seek to review and categorize research on counterfactual explanations, a specific class of explanation that provides a link between what could have happened had input to a model been changed in a particular way. Modern approaches to counterfactual explainability in machine learning draw connections to the established legal doctrine in many countries, making them appealing to fielded systems in high-impact areas such as finance and healthcare. Thus, we design a rubric with desirable properties of counterfactual explanation algorithms and comprehensively evaluate all currently-proposed algorithms against that rubric. Our rubric provides easy comparison and comprehension of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and serves as an introduction to major research themes in this field. We also identify gaps and discuss promising research directions in the space of counterfactual explainability.
To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized recommendations, recommender systems still suffer from several challenges, such as data sparsity and cold start. In recent years, generating recommendations with the knowledge graph as side information has attracted considerable interest. Such an approach can not only alleviate the abovementioned issues for a more accurate recommendation, but also provide explanations for recommended items. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey of knowledge graph-based recommender systems. We collect recently published papers in this field and summarize them from two perspectives. On the one hand, we investigate the proposed algorithms by focusing on how the papers utilize the knowledge graph for accurate and explainable recommendation. On the other hand, we introduce datasets used in these works. Finally, we propose several potential research directions in this field.